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Pushing the Envelope wishes our readers a joyful holiday season and a prosperous New Year. We will take a break this week, but we encourage you to read over the past year’s blogs and let us know what you think about any of the wide range of topics we blogged on in 2017.

On January 1, we will post our annual list of the Top 10 Postal Stories of the Year – one of our most popular blogs of the year.

As package volumes climb, so too has the U.S. Postal Service’s investments in sorting systems. Since 2015, it has deployed 33 Small Package Sorting System (SPSS) machines costing over $141 million. It intended to invest another $23 million to have seven more SPSS machines operational during the current holiday season.

Small purchases can add up. That’s certainly the case with the government’s purchase card program, which provides charge cards to more than 350 federal agencies, organizations, and Native American tribal governments.

Two times a year, we publish a report of our work and activities for a just-ended six-month period. This Semiannual Report to Congress (or SARC, as we affectionately call it) is required by law, but it’s also a chance for us to share our record of work with our many stakeholders.

The work reflects our mission of ensuring efficiency, accountability, and integrity in the U.S. Postal Service. We also help maintain confidence in the postal system and improve the Postal Service’s bottom line through independent audits, investigations, data analytics and research.

Do you mail in your tax returns? Have you ever received a summons for jury duty? If so, it’s likely you’ve sent or received Certified Mail — a special service from the U.S. Postal Service that provides proof of mailing to the sender.

If the post office wants to have a dress code for their employees that is fine, how ever I have noticed for several years now, the mail carriers will make smart mouth comments to customers about the...

Latest Blog Posts

Postal employees injured on the job can return to work even if they can’t perform their regular jobs — so long as the work is within their medically defined restrictions. That’s the idea behind the U.S. Postal Service’s Limited Duty...

Latest Audit Asks

The U.S. Postal Service uses highway contract routes (HCR) to transport mail between post offices and other designated points where mail is received or dispatched. An extra trip is one made in addition to those outlined in the contract; it results in added costs. Extra trips can be the result of...

The U.S. Postal Service considers mail to be delayed when it is not processed in time to meet the established delivery day. Postal Service personnel count mail daily, self-report delayed mail, and enter the information into the Mail Condition Reporting System. Delayed mail reporting is important...

More than 42,000 Americans died from opioid-related overdoses in 2016 – five times higher than in 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Illegal opioids, including increasingly potent synthetic versions such as fentanyl, account for about half of those deaths.

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We encourage you to visit our blog, which has a new topic for discussion every Monday. You can also give us your thoughts and opinions about upcoming audits on our Audit Asks page. Please refer to our comment policy for further information.